Thursday, September 2, 2010

Lord of Armies (Hosts)

 The phrase "Lord of Hosts" which appears in the Bible (in the original Hebrew) literally means, "Lord of Armies." I guess "hosts" was the King James English translation of that phrase. But the ancients believed that if they won a military victory, it was because whatever god or gods they worshiped had looked after them. You see the same kind of thinking in Homer's Iliad -- Zeus protecting one side, Hera protecting the other. We haven't come very far from that primitive ideology.